A user may search a database by creating a search request, submitting the search request to a search engine, and receiving search results. A database may be a collection of Internet websites, data on a user's hard drive, a subset of one or both, or any other aggregate of data. A search engine is any program that crawls a database looking for search results to present to the user based on the user's search request. Search results may be returned to the user based on an algorithm used to crawl a database the user is searching.
Search results may be returned to a user as a group of selectable items such as links. For example, a user may search the World Wide Web (WWW) and receive a list of text links to Internet websites. The search results may be displayed within a window, for example, and may be listed in order of relevance. The appearance of search results may be dull and uninspiring, and may not sufficiently take advantage of available graphics technology.
Thus, what is needed is a search application without the limitations of conventional techniques.